ABSTRACT
In the last few years, the world has witnessed a major increase in the number of full-scale armed conflicts occurring among ethnic and religious factions. These conflicts have ranged across a wide geographical area which covers subSaharan and northern Africa as well as Syria and Iraq in the Middle East; its reach also extends to include Afghanistan, Pakistan, and western China too. In the West, these new conflicts are popularly associated with radical expressions of Islam, and responses to them have tended to feed the revival of the concept of a ‘clash of civilizations’ (Huntington 1993) with an unyielding ‘we’ (the West) set against a disruptive ‘them’ (Islam).
